Ok, at my wits end, which means the solution is probably fairly simple.

I get "Fatal error: Your /boot/second.b is located above the magic 2GB boundary from the start of the disk. Please move it down so that SILO first stage loader can load it." when I go to run silo with:
"silo -C /boot/silo.conf"

Now, I would like to mention that my /boot partition (sda1) was created using the _last_ 64MB of cylinders on the disk, which _should_ put it well below the 2GB "magic" boundary, right? So I thought. How do I correct this problem so I can boot my new kernel from disk rather than the generic from gentoo cd?